"Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice."

"Two communities developing two almost exactly identical pieces of software instead of just one; makes both communities weaker and makes progress slower.

That's usual in GNU/Linux/FOSS world.

How many widget toolkits are there? How many desktop environments? How many distros? How many pieces of software that do the same thing? People like for sure reinventing the wheel. "

That's not a valid comparison: there is only toolkit with the Qt API and toolkit with the GTK+ API. There's OpenMotif and there is/was lesstif but that was not a fork.

There some different office packages already but, while there are some specific variants of OpenOffice, the only real fork is Libreoffice. This will cause a lot of repeated efforts until the projects diverge (which is admittedly not that bad). The *real* downside, of course, is that 100 people were laid off by Oracle after libreoffice forked.

The license may become an interesting difference though. I would see why IBM is more interested in keeping the code under a non-copyleft license, and others may follow.

All in all, I like the forking idea: there was no advantage in giving the code to libreoffice since they already have it with the license they want and they are not asking for code attribution so there was nothing to gain by giving the code to libreoffice.